DISQUS

This is a very misleading analogy. A less-poor analogy is when a developer asks his OS for 10K of memory and gets a pointer... but it's only for 3K of memory. Are you going to trust the method you just called? Are you (the big banks) going to buy a mortgage bundle from a bank that claims they are worth 1M and 15% of the assets default? Are you going to buy stock in those banks that currently own mortgages where 15% or more of the assets may end in bankruptcy? Will you lend to a small business? There's the problem. It starts in housing, but is not contained therein. Our economy has plenty of "bandwidth" and intelligent agent leaf-nodes which are very able to find new interfaces. The problem is that we are learning that things are not as stable as we had hoped. Step 1 is to discover the value of the assets that the failing / merging banks hold. Step 2 will probably be taking those assets (the "bail out" bill) from those banks and leave them holding more stable assets so those who will lend to them can trust that they can perhaps actually pay. :)

Sorry to be so negative, but man, this post is really misleading.

Having read a few published formal debates may I recommend that the format be:

Thesis: CC is Whack / Ineffective
(Perhaps this could be formalized some ;) )

Both sides write and opening position. Why CC is ineffective, why it is. (some word limit)

Both sides rebut the opener. (smaller word limit)

Both sides respond to the rebuttal (smaller yet).

If you are concerned about audience attention spans, break the topic up into many sub topics and go round-and-round in this format. In my opinion, it works very very well if you want the resulting document to be a good self-contained work. Looking forward to the scuffle!!! Cheers!